Richard Lennox
- found a bug in Firefox - doubt it'll get fixed though!
- How Big is Social Media in the UK? [VIDEO] http://bit.ly/aIYgrs
- "Technical Issues" on the BBC homepage - something you don't see everyday!
Archive for May, 2007
Virgin Media DNS vs Open DNS: Update
It is a few months now since I changed the DNS server I use from the standard Virgin Media DNS to the one serviced by OpenDNS. It is now time for an update.
Using Open DNS has been a breeze. I have noticed very little difference in the speed at which web pages loaded but to be honest I didn't really expect to see much difference. What has been really useful is the on-the-fly spelling correction. Even though I can pretty much touch type, I still hit a variety of common mistakes, especially when I am in a hurry and not paying attention. Most of these are caught by Open DNS and redirected to the intended site. The anti-phishing solution is also pretty nifty, although less frequently used as I can generally spot phishing.
I did however run into a little problem with Virgin Media when I last complained about my internet speed. They were adamant that it would be Open DNS causing the slow down, but in a little over the phone experiment, Open DNS beat their own DNS servers, by a fraction. Although not really enough to call it a clear winner it was a sign of connection issues not DNS issues. To be fair with Virgin, other suppliers may have insisted that I not use Open DNS but they didn't (or maybe they would if their technical support team found out what DNS is!).
Is this lazy or what?
Is this lazy or clever? Maybe it is the only reason to buy a Segway!
Domain spoofing
It seems that spammers are yet again spoofing my domain to send out spam emails. This is really annoying but unpreventable apparently.
What happens is that the spammers send out loads of emails having modified the "FROM" address to appear as if it came from an email on my domain. They then obfuscate the email headers to hide their actual location making it very difficult to trace them. Imagine someone handwriting hundred of letters and signing someone else's name and address and sending them out. It would almost be impossible to prevent that, and domain spoofing is a similar concept but with emails.
A decent spam filter will more than likely prevent the spam getting through. My apologies if you have received spam from this domain, I am doing what I can to prevent it.
Windows Update
Quite an ironic title to this post given that it was Windows update that broke my machine! It is confirmed. For 2 nights and several dozen restarts, my machine has been running smoothly again, all be it with automatic updates disabled.
There will probably be a nagging doubt about it few a little (read Long here) while longer but we will just wait and see.
Windows broke my machine – again!
Another weekend of annoyance and pain. Windows broke my machine again. Again I hear you say, yes again.
This time though with Ubuntu linux set up on my old machine – hooray for those 30 minutes spent installing it – I was able to source the problem to… guess what…Windows. Yes, Windows! Windows update to be more precise!! Is it a hardware compatibility issue or something else I do not know, but tonight and I may be speaking far too early I think I cracked it – with a little help from that font of knowledge called the web!
It would not surprise me if Microsoft in its wisdom, when putting a 435MB service pack for Visual Studio, they wrecked an entire system of machines! Not exactly a wise choice. Lets hope this doesn't take all night to install manually!
For anyone with huge "The instruction at…..The memory could not be read" error message followed by a 'Generic Host Process for Win32 Services had encountered a problem and needs to close.', the details of which point to an issue in the msi.dll, look here and follow the quick steps in the bottom of the post!
Doesn’t time fly
Andrew wrote a post recently on this same theme.
It has got me thinking how quickly time has gone by. It seems only last week it was December and Christmas, never mind January, February, March and April! Look at it now. Today, being first Monday in May, is May day, that's us four months into 2007 already and what is to show for it…
Well January as usual was a bit of a slow month, how can it be anything else when it is dark on the way to work and even darker on the way home! That bit of light seen through the drizzle out of the office window is all you get, unless you venture out at lunchtime. February saw our trip to Budapest and March Mam's 50th. April was all work and no play except of course for a couple of bouts of Friday night excess.
And now it is May, all in all not a bad month I hope. It will be busy, punctured by the trip to Carrickfergus. I need to seriously consider how to progress from employee to freelancer and take this forward. Although I doubt very much I will be any less of an employee anytime soon, it is the direction I wish to go in. All I need now a couple of clients or someone who needs a little help to get me on my way. If anyone therefore has a design that they want made up into hand coded, valid XHTML and CSS and then turned into Wordpress (or other) themes drop me an email, I may even look at a discount to get me started!